GasBuddy News Article

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License plate data not just for cops: Private companies are tracking your car

nbcnews .com
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License plate recognition technology developed for law enforcement and embraced by the auto repossession industry is being opened to wider use through a Florida company that lets its clients track the travels of millions of private vehicles – adding to privacy advocates’ concerns that such data could be used improperly.

TLO, an investigative technology company in Boca Raton, Fla., began offering the search service to its private industry clients in late June, saying it taps into a database of more than 1 billion records collected by automatic license plate readers.

A report earlier this week by the ACLU found that U.S. law enforcement agencies are scooping up droves of data using license plate readers, creating massive databases where more than 99 percent of the entries represent

Kind of tempts me to ship one of my license plates to a friend in Hawaii and ask her to put it on her car a few days, then ship it to a friend in Florida to do the same, zig zag it around the nation and eventually back to me from Alaska or Oregon and see how the experimental head game goes.